Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/76

 however, can be imagined on which public banquets were appropriate and might be given. The usages at them would, for the most part, be of the same nature.

The eleventh and twelfth chapters of the Î Lî are occupied with the ceremony of the banquet. The author of this Treatise quotes passages here and there from them, and appends his own explanation of their educational significance. Two lessons, he says, were especially illustrated in them:—the right relations to be maintained between superiors and inferiors, and the distinction between the noble and the mean.

The subject of the Phing Î is the interchange of missions between the ancient feudal states. It was a rule of the kingdom that those states should by such interchange maintain a good understanding with one another, as a means of preventing both internal disturbances and aggression from without. P. Callery gives for the title:—"Signification (du Rite) des Visites." I have met with it rendered in English by "The Theory of Embassies;" but the Phing was not an embassy on any great state occasion, nor was it requisite that it should be sent at stated intervals. It could not be long neglected between two states without risk to the good fellowship between them, but events might at any time occur in any one state which would call forth such an expression of friendly sympathy from others.

A mission occasioned a very considerable expenditure to the receiving state, and the author, with amusing ingenuity, explains this as a device to teach the princes and their peoples to care little for such outlay in comparison with the maintenance of the custom and its ceremonies.

Those visits are treated with all the necessary details in the Î Lî, Books XV-XVIII; and though the extracts from them are not many, we get from the author a sufficiently intelligible account of the nature of the missions and the way in which they were carried through.